“Layaway Angels” bring unexpected joy to holiday shoppers

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Attention Kmart shoppers!!!

Some of you- and you know who you are- are proving there’s a lot of good in this world– and showing the rest of us the true meaning of Christmas.

It’s an amazing example of people paying it forward. Helping each other and asking for nothing in return. For some, it’s the best Christmas gift imaginable- a reminder of just how good people can be.

The spirit of Christmas isn’t just on display outside this Des Plaines Kmart—inside, well, there’s an angel around here somewhere. The so-called “Layaway Angels”n spreading good cheer again this Christmastime. Coming to the store looking for layaways loaded with toys and children’s clothes and paying the tab, or most of it, anyway. Leaving Kmart workers like Sue here feeling a lot like Santa Claus.

“They get so excited. The ones today it took their breath away and they just kept telling us ‘it can’t be… we don’t understand,” Operations Manager Sue Sullivan said.

Imagine what these angels do for people like Isabel, and her four siblings. Her parents, both out of work, showed up to pick up her gifts and got the surprise of a lifetime.

“I thought it was a joke. I thought it was some kind of candid camera thing, so I kept looking up at the cameras behind the desk,” Derryc Fini said.

Security cameras did catch something and it was pretty candid. Just snippets of their shocked reaction. Disbelief at first, then a wave of gratitude.

Vanessa Soto said she “Told the managers to shut up– that’s all I could say, was shut up, shut up, cause I couldn’t believe it.”

“I’ve heard of things like this happening to people,” she said, “and to finally have it happen to us– as much as we’ve been struggling this whole year, you know, it was pretty amazing.”

So Derryc and Vanessa, they found themselves with a few extra bucks in their pocket, right? So what did they do? They put it toward someone else’s layaway– another one with a lot of toys and children’s clothes..

$3,000 worth of other people’s bills have been paid off at this store in just the last few days, lots more in the last couple of years, $1.5 million in the last two years alone—It gets bigger every year.